Oscar Wilde Quotes

Learned conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally unemployed.

When people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting.

The General was essentially a man of peace, except in his domestic life.

The British cook, for her iniquities, is a foolish woman who should be turned into a pillar of salt which she never knows how to use.

Give me the luxuries and I can dispense with the necessities.

Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.

I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don't talk politics.

As yet, Bernard Shaw hasn't become prominent enough to have any enemies, but none of his friends like him.

The best one can say of modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality.

It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners.

In England it is enough for a man to try and produce any serious, beautiful work to lose all his rights as a citizen.

I believe it is customary in good society to take some slight refreshment at five o'clock.

There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation.

Life would be dull without them.

There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.

Judges, like the criminal classes, have their lighter moments

Marriage is hardly a thing one can do now and then, except in America.

Women's styles may change but their designs remain the same.

Her capacity for family affection is extraordinary. When her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief.

It is a much cleverer thing to talk nonsense than to listen to it.

Immanuel isn't a pun; he Kant be!

All criticism is a form of autobiography

Nature is always behind the age

It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institutions of private property.

Industry is the root of all ugliness.

What do you call a bad man? The sort of man who admires innocence.

Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.

There are few things easier than to live badly and die well.

An alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory.

I can resist anything but the temptation to make a clever witticism.

Music is the perfect type of art.

It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression.

Nature, which makes nothing durable, always repeats itself so that nothing which it makes may be lost.

America is not a country, it is a world.

The study of law is sublime, and its practice vulgar.

Lots of people act well, but few people talk well. This shows that talking is the more difficult of the two.

If art is to have a special train, the critic must keep some seats reserved on it.

Never buy a thing you don't want merely because it is dear.

Artists reproduce themselves or each other, with wearisome iteration. But criticism is always moving on, and the critic is always developing.

Action is limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams.

When I went to America I had two secretaries, one for autographs, one for locks of hair. Within six months the one had died of writer's cramp, the other was completely bald.

Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob. It is through the voice of one crying in the wilderness that the ways of the gods must be prepared.

It's not hard to get the ideas when they come. They just come... it's painful waiting for them.

Life is a great disappointment.

That is the mission of art - to make us pause and look at a thing a second time.

Foxhunting... the unspeakable pursuing the inedible.

The evil that machinery is doing is not merely in the consequence of its work but in the fact that it makes men themselves machines also.

To elope is cowardly; it is running away from danger; and danger has become so rare in modern life.

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves.